by Will Durant
Skepticism, however, is uncomfortable; it leaves the common heart and imagination empty, and the vacuum soon draws in some new and encouraging creed. The victories of philosophy and Alexander cleared the way for novel cults. Athens in the third century was so disturbed by exotic faiths, nearly all of them promising heaven and threatening hell, that Epicurus, like Lucretius in first-century Rome, felt called upon to denounce religion as hostile to peace of mind and joy of life. The new temples, even in Athens, were now usually dedicated to Isis, Serapis, Bendis, Adonis, or some other alien deity. The Eleusinian mysteries flourished, and were imitated in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, and Crete; Dionysus Eleutherios—the Liberator—remained popular until he was absorbed into Christ; Orphism won fresh devotees as it renewed contact with the Eastern faiths from which it had sprung. The old religion had been aristocratic, and had excluded foreigners and slaves; the new Oriental cults accepted all men and women, alien or bond or free, and held out to all classes the promise of eternal life.
Superstition spread while science reached its apogee. Theophrastus’ portrait of the Superstitious Man reveals how frail was the film of culture even in the capital of enlightenment and philosophy. The number seven was unspeakably holy; there were seven planets, seven days of the week, seven Wonders, seven Ages of Man, seven heavens, seven gates of hell. Astrology was rejuvenated by commerce with Babylonia; people took it for granted that the stars were gods who ruled in detail the destinies of individuals and states; character, even thought, was determined by the star or planet under which one had been born, and would therefore be jovial, or mercurial, or saturnine; even the Jews, the least superstitious of all peoples, expressed good wishes by saying Mazzol-tov—“May your planet be favorable.”24 Astronomy fought for its life against astrology, but finally succumbed in the second century A.D. And everywhere the Hellenistic world worshiped Tyche, the great god Chance.
Only an act of persistent imagination, or a gift for observation, can enable us to realize what it means to a nation to have its traditional religion die. Classic Greek civilization had been built upon a patriotic devotion to the city-state, and classic morality, though rooted in folkways rather than in faith, had been powerfully reinforced by supernatural belief. But now neither faith nor patriotism survived in the educated Greek; civic frontiers had been erased by empires; and the growth of knowledge had secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law. For a time the Periclean Enlightenment helped morality, as in modern Europe; humanitarian feelings were developed, and aroused—ineffectually—a keener resentment against war; arbitration grew among cities and men. Manners were more polished, argument more urbane; courtesy trickled down, as in our Middle Ages, from the courts of the kings, where it was a matter of personal safety and royal prestige; when the Romans came Greece was amazed at their bad manners and blunt ways. Life was more refined; women moved about in it more freely, and stimulated the males to unwonted elegance. Men shaved now, especially in Byzantium and Rhodes, where the laws forbade it as effeminate.25 But the pursuit of pleasure consumed the adult life of the upper classes. The old problem of ethics and morals—to reconcile the natural epicureanism of the individual with the necessary stoicism of the state—found no solution in religion, statesmanship, or philosophy.
Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state. Some cities, like Miletus and Rhodes, established public—i.e., government-supported—schools; at Teos and Chios boys and girls were educated together, with an impartiality that only Sparta had shown26 The gymnasium developed into a high school or college, with classrooms, lecture hall, and library. The palaestra flourished, and proved popular in the East; but public games had degenerated into professional contests, chiefly boxing, in which strength counted for more than skill; the Greeks, who had once been a nation of athletes, became now a nation of spectators, content to witness rather than to do.
Sexual morality was relaxed even beyond the loose standards of the Periclean age. Homosexualism remained popular; the youth Delphis “is in love,” says Theocritus’ Simaetha, “but whether for a woman or for a man I cannot say.”27 The courtesan still reigned: Demetrius Poliorcetes levied a tax of two hundred and fifty talents ($750,000) upon the Athenians, and then gave it to his mistress Lamia on the ground that she needed it for soap; which led the angry Athenians to remark how unclean the lady must be.28 Dances of naked women were accepted as part of the mores, and were performed before a Macedonian king.29 Athenian life was portrayed in Menander’s plays as a round of triviality, seduction, and adultery.
Greek women participated actively in the cultural pursuits of the time, and contributed to letters, science, philosophy, and art. Aristodama of Smyrna gave recitals of her poetry throughout Greece, and received many honors. Some philosophers, like Epicurus, did not hesitate to admit women into their schools. Literature began to stress the physical loveliness of woman rather than her worth and charm as a mother; the literary cult of feminine beauty arose in this period alongside the poetry and fiction of romantic love. The partial emancipation of woman was accompanied by a revolt against wholesale maternity, and the limitation of the family became the outstanding social phenomenon of the age. Abortion was punishable only if practiced by a woman against the wish of her husband, or at the instigation of her seducer. When a child came it was in many cases exposed. Only one family in a hundred, in the old Greek cities, reared more than one daughter: “Even a rich man,” reports Poseidippus, “always exposes a daughter.” Sisters were a rarity. Families with no child, or only one, were numerous. Inscriptions enable us to trace the fertility of seventy-nine families in Miletus about 200 B.C.: thirty-two had one child, thirty-one had two; altogether they had one hundred and eighteen sons and twenty-eight daughters.30 At Eretria only one family in twelve had two sons; hardly any had two daughters. Philosophers condoned infanticide as reducing the pressure of population; but when the lower classes took up the practice on a large scale, the death rate overtook the birth rate. Religion, which had once frightened men into fertility lest their dead souls be untended, no longer had the power to outweigh considerations of comfort and cost. In the colonies immigration replaced the old families; in Attica and the Peloponnesus immigration trickled down to a negligible figure, and population declined. In Macedonia Philip V forbade the limitation of the family, and in thirty years raised the man power of the country fifty per cent;31 we may judge from this how widespread the practice of limitation had become, even in half-primitive Macedon. “In our time,” wrote Polybius about 150 B.C.,
the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit. . . . For as men had fallen into such a state of luxury, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or, if they married, to rear the children born to them, or at most but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance—the evil insensibly but rapidly grew. For in cases where, of one or two children, the one was carried off by war and the other by sickness, it was evident that the houses must have been left empty . . . and by small degrees cities became resourceless and feeble.32
IV. REVOLUTION IN SPARTA
Meanwhile that concentration of wealth, which everywhere in Greece was enflaming the eternal conflict of classes, produced in Sparta two attempts at revolutionary reform. Isolated by its mountain barriers, Sparta had maintained its independence, had fought back the Macedonians, and had bravely defeated the immense army of Pyrrhus (272). But the greed of the strong generated from within the ruin that enemy forces had failed to bring from without. The Lycurgean laws against alienating the land from the family by sale, or dividing it in bequests, had been abrogated,* and the fortunes made by Spartans in empire or war had gone to buying up the soil.33 B
y 244 the 700,000 acres of Laconia were owned by one hundred families,34 and only seven hundred men had preserved the rights of citizenship. Even these no longer ate in common; the poor could not make the necessary contribution, while the rich preferred to feast in private. A large majority of the families that had once enjoyed the franchise had sunk into poverty, and called for a cancellation of debts and a redivision of the land.
It is to the credit of monarchy that the attempt to reform this condition came from the Spartan kings. In 242 Agis IV and Leonidas succeeded to the dual throne. Convinced that Lycurgus had meant the land to be equally divided among all freemen, Agis proposed to redistribute it, to annul all debts, and to restore the semicommunism of Lycurgus. Those landowners whose property was mortgaged supported the move for cancellation; but when the measure had been passed they resisted violently the remaining elements of Agis’ reforms. At the instigation of Leonidas, Agis was murdered, along with his mother and his grandmother, both of whom had volunteered to surrender their great estates for division among the people. In this royal drama the noblest characters were women. Chilonis, daughter of Leonidas, was the wife of Cleombrotus, who supported Agis. When Leonidas was exiled, and Cleombrotus seized his throne, Chilonis left her triumphant husband to share her father’s banishment; when Leonidas recaptured power and exiled Cleombrotus, Chilonis chose exile with her husband.35
Leonidas, to get the rich property of Agis’ widow into his family, compelled her to marry his son Cleomenes. But Cleomenes fell in love with his wife, and imbibed from her the ideas of the dead king. When he came to the throne as Cleomenes III he resolved to carry out Agis’ reforms. Having won over the army by his courage in war, and the people by the simplicity of his life, he abolished the oligarchic ephorate on the ground that Lycurgus had never sanctioned it; he killed fourteen resisters, exiled eighty, canceled all debts, divided the land among the free population, and restored the Lycurgean discipline. Not content, he set out to conquer the Peloponnese for the revolution. The proletariat everywhere hailed him as a liberator, and many towns surrendered to him gladly; he took Argos, Pellene, Phlius, Epidaurus, Hermione, Troezen, at last even rich Corinth. The ferment of his program spread: in Boeotia the payment of debts was abandoned, and the state appropriated funds to appease the poor; in Megalopolis the philosopher Cercidas pled with the rich to aid the needy before revolution destroyed all wealth.36 When Cleomenes invaded Achaea and defeated Aratus all upper-class Greece trembled for its property. Aratus appealed to Macedonia. Antigonus Doson came down, overwhelmed Cleomenes at Sellasia (221), and restored the oligarchic regime in Lacedaemon. Cleomenes fled to Egypt, tried and failed to win the help of Ptolemy III, tried and failed to rouse the Alexandrians to revolution, and killed himself.37
The class war continued. A generation after Cleomenes the people of Sparta overthrew the government, and set up a revolutionary dictatorship. Philopoemen, who had succeeded Aratus as head of the Achaean League, invaded Laconia, and restored the rule of property. As soon as Philopoemen had gone the people rose again, and set up Nabis as dictator (207). Nabis was a Syrian Semite who had been captured in war and sold into slavery at Megalopolis; smarting under suppressed ability, he had revenged himself by organizing a revolt among the Helots. Now he gave Spartan citizenship to all freemen, and freed all the Helots with one word. When the rich obstructed him he confiscated their wealth and cut off their heads. The news of his doings went abroad, and he found it a simple matter, with the help of the poorer classes, to conquer Argos, Messenia, Elis, and part of Arcadia. Everywhere he nationalized large estates, redistributed the land, and abolished debts.38 The Achaean League, unable to overthrow him, appealed to Rome for aid. Flamininus came, but Nabis offered so resolute a resistance that the Roman accepted a truce by which Nabis was to release the imprisoned rich, but would retain his power. At this juncture Nabis was assassinated by an agent of the Aetolian League (192).39 Four years later Philopoemen marched in again, propped up the oligarchs, abolished the Lycurgean regimen, and sold three thousand of Nabis’ followers into slavery. The revolution was ended, but so was Sparta; it continued to exist, but it played no further part in the history of Greece.
V. THE ASCENDANCY OF RHODES
Frightened by the violence of faction and drawn by the movements of population, trade and capital passed from the mainland and sought new havens in the Aegean. Delos, once rich through Apollo, flourished in the second century as a free port under the protection of Rome and the management of Athens. The little isle was crowded with alien merchants, business offices, palaces and hovels, and the diverse temples of exotic faiths.
Rhodes reached her zenith in the third century, and was then by common consent the most civilized and beautiful city in Hellas. Strabo described the great port as “so far superior to all others in harbors, roads, walls, and improvements that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it.”40 Situated at one of the crossroads of the Mediterranean, in a position to take advantage of that expanding trade which Alexander’s conquests had made possible between Europe, Egypt, and Asia, Rhodes’ spacious harbors replaced Tyre and the Piraeus as a port of reshipment for goods, and as a clearinghouse for the organization and financing of commerce in the eastern sea. Her merchants established a profitable reputation for honesty, her banks and her government for stability, in a world of treachery and change; her powerful fleet, manned by her citizens, cleared the Aegean of pirates, maintained an equal security for the merchant vessels of all nations, and established a code of maritime law so ably devised and so widely accepted that it governed Mediterranean trade for centuries, and passed down into the marine law of Rome, Constantinople, and Venice.
Having freed herself from Macedonian domination by her heroic resistance to Demetrius Poliorcetes (305), Rhodes steered successfully through the troubled politics of the age by maintaining a wise neutrality, or by going to war only to check the growth of an aggressor state, or to preserve the freedom of the seas. She united many of the Aegean cities in an “Island League,” and exercised her presidency so fairly that no one questioned her right to lead. Her government—an aristocracy resting on a democratic base as in republican Rome—ruled the synoecized cities of Lindus, Camirus, Ialysus, and Rhodes with skill and comparative justice, gave to alien residents such privileges as Athens had never yielded to her metics, protected a large population of slaves so well that when in danger it dared to arm them, and laid upon the rich men of the city the obligation to take care of the poor.41 The state met its expenses by a two per cent tax upon imports and exports. It lent money generously, sometimes without interest, to cities in distress.
When Rhodes herself was physically ruined by an earthquake (225), all the Greek world came to her aid, for everyone recognized that her disappearance from the Aegean would lead to commercial and financial chaos. Hieron II sent one hundred gold talents ($300,000), and set up in the restored city a statuary group showing the people of Rhodes being crowned by the people of Syracuse. Ptolemy III sent three hundred talents* of silver; Antigonus III sent three thousand, together with great quantities of timber and pitch for building; his queen Chryseis gave three thousand talents of lead, and 150,000 bushels of corn. Seleucus III sent 300,000 bushels of corn and ten fully equipped quinqueremes. “As for the towns that contributed each according to its means,” says Polybius, “it would be difficult to enumerate them.”42 It was a bright interlude in the dark annals of political history, one of the rare occasions when all the Greek world thought and acted as one.
CHAPTER XXIV
Hellenism and the Orient
I. THE SELEUCID EMPIRE
AS we move from the mainland through the Aegean into the Greek settlements in Asia and Egypt we are surprised to find a fresh and flourishing life, and we perceive that the Hellenistic age saw not so much the decay as the dissemination of Greek civilization. From the end of the Peloponnesian War a stream of Greek soldiers and immigrants had entered Asia. Alexander’s conquests widen
ed this stream by offering new opportunities and avenues to Hellenic enterprise.
Seleucus, called “Nicator” (Victor), was distinguished among Alexander’s generals as a man of courage, imagination, and unscrupulous generosity. It was characteristic of him that he gave his second wife, the beautiful Stratonice, to his son Demetrius when he learned that the boy was pining away for love of her. Antigonus I, challenging the allotment of Babylonia to Seleucus, set out to conquer for himself all the Near East; Seleucus and Ptolemy I defeated him at Gaza in 312. From that moment the house of Seleucus dated the Seleucid Empire, and a new era—a mode of reckoning that survived in western Asia till Mohammed. Seleucus united under his scepter the old kingdoms and cultures of Elam, Sumeria, Persia, Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia, and, at times, Asia Minor and Palestine. At Seleucia and Antioch he built capitals richer and more populous than any ever known in mainland Greece. For Seleucia he chose a site near the aged Babylon and the future Baghdad, almost at the junction of the Euphrates and the Tigris; it was conveniently located to attract commerce between Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf and beyond; within half a century it had a population of 600,000 souls—a motley mass of Asiatics dominated by a minority of Greeks.* Antioch was similarly situated on the Orontes, not too far from its mouth to be reached by ocean shipping, yet sufficiently inland to be safe from naval attack, to tap the fertile fields of the river valley, and to draw the Mediterranean trade of northern Mesopotamia and Syria. Here the later Seleucid emperors established their residence, until under Antiochus IV it became the wealthiest city of Seleucid Asia, adorned with temples, porticoes, theaters, gymnasiums, palaestras, flower gardens, landscaped boulevards, and parks so beautiful that the Garden of Daphne was known throughout Greece for its laurels and cypresses, its fountains and streams.